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Congratulations Perseverance! Did you start any b school specific stuff?

Thanks mbalady! I actually just started the 'research' phase. I'm happy I finished the important GMAT step. I have plenty of time to research and visit schools before I start the essays etc. What step in the process are you at?

Back in Dec I got a 680 GMAT with a low quant score (44) so I am in the starting to re-study phase lol (its been hard to get motivated to be honest). However I have done some research and have a short list of schools that I am targeting, have started to reach out to students and alumni, and have some visits scheduled for March and am planning a couple more for April so I am a bit into the research stage concurrently as well. I do need to focus more on the GMAT though. I def. wish you all the best through out the rest of this 'journey' we are embarking on

I just took the gmat and didnt fare at all ...and am gunning for the May schedule. My basic areas of weakness are quant, since I didnt study maths after class 10th. My conceptual understanding itself is weak as a result I dont know how to interpret the quant questions.

Something I think is useful when you are still early on and use MGMAT books, plus some other book (Kaplan or the like), and the OG, do not do what MGMAT tells you to do: I would not go straight from finishing an MGMAT book chapter to solving the problems they suggest in the OG. Do their end of chapter problems and then find appropriate questions in the Kaplan book and apply/hone your skills there. Here is my reasoning: I want to tackle the OG last as a 'true' test to see if I really took the concepts to heart. Now to train and master the concepts, non-official questions should be sufficient. It will allow you to really test your grasp of the techniques on questions that came from the actual test in the OG.

I did not follow this strategy after the MGMAT CR and RC strategy guides. I went straight to the OG after each chapter, did those problems, and then did the MGMAT question banks. This was very demoralizing because I found the OG extremely easy, hitting around 95% accuracy on each of CR and RC sections. However, after finishing the OG and going back to the MGMAT online question banks, I decreased DRASTICALLY to around 80% accuracy. At first I thought it was because I was not used to the computer format, but I also did a question bank untimed and still my accuracy was shot. My conclusion is that MGMAT questions are very different from OG questions in that they are a lot harder.

My question is, are the 700-800 level questions in OG really representative of what will be seen on the GMAT for a 700-800 level tester, or is MGMAT more representative?

Something I think is useful when you are still early on and use MGMAT books, plus some other book (Kaplan or the like), and the OG, do not do what MGMAT tells you to do: I would not go straight from finishing an MGMAT book chapter to solving the problems they suggest in the OG. Do their end of chapter problems and then find appropriate questions in the Kaplan book and apply/hone your skills there. Here is my reasoning: I want to tackle the OG last as a 'true' test to see if I really took the concepts to heart. Now to train and master the concepts, non-official questions should be sufficient. It will allow you to really test your grasp of the techniques on questions that came from the actual test in the OG.

I did not follow this strategy after the MGMAT CR and RC strategy guides. I went straight to the OG after each chapter, did those problems, and then did the MGMAT question banks. This was very demoralizing because I found the OG extremely easy, hitting around 95% accuracy on each of CR and RC sections. However, after finishing the OG and going back to the MGMAT online question banks, I decreased DRASTICALLY to around 80% accuracy. At first I thought it was because I was not used to the computer format, but I also did a question bank untimed and still my accuracy was shot. My conclusion is that MGMAT questions are very different from OG questions in that they are a lot harder.

My question is, are the 700-800 level questions in OG really representative of what will be seen on the GMAT for a 700-800 level tester, or is MGMAT more representative?

I really like ThomasD's strategy, but if it's true that tough OG questions are not as tough as what I will see on the GMAT, I am slightly scared that if I follow ThomasD's strategy of doing OG last, I will be overconfident and think I am prepared when I am really not...

well when I posted that approach, the approach was really meant to internalized the concepts MGMAT teaches and there I felt that of course if you do the OG problems right after you learned the concept you will know how to apply it and (hopefully) get the answers correct. However, the key thing IMO is that you have to really internalize the strategies, so I suggested two things:a) Learn the strategies and learn them early on b) Practice them with Kaplan material or the like and then at the end come back to the official questions and make sure that you can tackle those with the strategies you have learned.

This approach is irrespective of the question difficulty level and your target score.

With respect to your concerns over the difficulty of the OG questions and other prep material compared to the real GMAT, I mean go through this forum here and you will see that some feel one way and some feel another way. To me, OG questions (just like GMATprep) is material that comes from official retired GMAT question pools and as such I feel this is as close to real as you can get.